I am with Toodoped on this one. This is an evil life and should not be celebrated. If you agree with that, you should also understand that the mob would still be flourishing if it weren't for the cooperators. You can debate until you're blue in the face about what type of people cooperators are, but you can't deny the facts. No one is rooting for the cooperators (who are also criminals and sociopaths), but rooting for the mob is just retarded.
Not everyone in it is evil, that's silly. Bookies, numbers runners, even union guys, most are good. Who bets? Are they evil too? The rats tend to be the ones who were evil, yet they walk free, plus lie by saying what they are told to say for their deal to walk free. LE has always leaked stories to news reporters that exaggerate only the worst of the life, suckers eat it up as truth.
I never called the guys evil. I said the life was evil. There have been plenty of people who became part of the street who were essentially good guys
Bingo! And in the old days, maybe not so much nowadays, but in the old days...back in the early 1900s thru the 1950s era, many guys grew up in a poverty few of us could even imagine today.
So it might have not been a "pass" per se, but there was a damn good reason why many of them went into the line of "work" they did.
In the year approaching 2024? Not so much!
My grandmother one time said they did what they did because "They didn't want to work" .
But I think it wasn't that they didn't want to in every case.I think that some of them just weren't fit to do the jobs available to them.Not everybody can dig a ditch all day.Always believed different people are geared diifrently physically or mentally to do certain things. If you have the mind to be a lawyer but can't read or speak English,and can't dig a ditch,you do what you can do.If there is nothing that you can do available to you,maybe you do what you have to do to survive
That's not meant to be a blanket staement for all of them or maybe most of them.
Some of them lived together crowded in unsafe places not good enough for rats,starving,treated like dirt.
How can anyone expect the modern NYC gangsters to ever be as tough as those of yesteryear
I remember growing up aroundItalian immigrants who were "hard looking",and serious guys.Most of them never smiled.Just don't see that anymore in their descendants.Probably most of them wanted their offspring not to have to be tough and hard. Others wanted to instill a toughness and hardness in their sons even in a legal profession,because they saw the value of that.
