I would like to know more about any LCN activity in current day California, say from 2005 till today..

I know the L.A. family is practically defunct and has about 8 to 10 members left. The other 2 Nor-Cal families have been dead for years.
The Colombos and The Gambinos have guys in California if I'm correct. Do these guys have a crew or do they operate alone and how do they make their money?
Does anybody know if the other families have some kind of presence in California?

In my opinion there is so much money to be made by LCN in California.
I know there are a lot of street gangs, but LCN has more knowledge and experience in gambling and loansharking for example so I think that they could make some good money from these traditional mob staples alone. It's like what the guys from Sonny's crew say in Donnie Brasco: ''in New York you have a 1000 wiseguys all competing for the same fuckin' dollar..'' (or something along those lines, I'm paraphrasing)

California is just too far removed from the mob's powerbase and where the majority of the membership is today. Even back in the day the California families were small potatoes.

You have individual members in the state but you could probably count them on two hands. The LA family has something like 7 or 8 members left and half of them don't even live in California anymore.

I don't think there are any locally based, functioning crews there. About the only thing left (besides some legitimate business interests) is the mob's bookmaking networks that extend from back east our to cities in the west like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

I live in la and there is absolutely nothing Lcn going on. You could barely find an Italian shy or bookie out here. Let alone an active Lcn connection

Doesn't current Colombo acting underboss Donnie shacks montemerano live in LA ??

Donnie shark was banging Liz Hurley and run a sport betting ring. What remains of the LA family is runned by salvatore gambino ' s son Thomas after peter Milano death. In san Francisco the last don, Francesco Lanza died in 2006 but from the 70s the family was basically dead,the san Jose family was dead from the 80s with only 5 made men left.
The other mob family had one or two men that run things in LA but is definitly few things.
Are the black and latino gang that rules on Los Angeles.

My question is what do these black and latino gangs actually run besides the control of turf, narcotics and extortion?

Are they big in the mob staples of loansharking, sports betting, card games and other forms of gambling??

Again, I think there's a huge untapped market there for LCN's services, especially in the more well off regions of California..

Billy for sure there are black and latino bookies or shy,the gangs are focused on sell dope and other violent crimes while activity like books,numbers and collect juice need a more sophisticated organization that crack heads from the ghettos dont had.

For answer to your question: if the bookie is strong enough to stay alone ok, in the other cases must pay the gang of the Hood.

How much of a loansharking racket is there anymore? Home equity, sub prime lending, payday loans. You don't need to go to a wiseguy for quick cash anymore. Loansharking has been legitimized in this country in recent decades. It's what tanked the economy.

You hear a lot more about Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Coen than you do about Jack Dragna or any other of the LA family members. I think New York always ran things in Hollywood low key through their Jewish connections, for whatever reason. The only LA Family member really big in this scene was Johnny Roselli, who I believe was actually Chicago Outfit, and who was sent to work with the LA family. It's hard to say why the LA family never really prospered in the commission's heyday, although I recall they were powerful during Prohibition. My guess is that by the time the Commission was gaining power, the LAPD was recruiting a lot of southern white racists that viewed Italians as an ethnic minority.

Whatever's left of the loansharking racket out west is probably controlled by Russians, although I'm betting it's a small piece of the pie compared to what the legitimate, sub prime loan industry has.

joe isgro a gambino soldier lives out there recently got indicted

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/nyregi...ation.html?_r=0


tommy gambino the underboss of whats left of the milaino mob if anything is left. He is cousins with frank cali he lives in LA

in new york and New jeresy loansharking is massive money maker for the mob

I'm sure the racket's there, but it's hard to believe it's massive considering there are too many ways for even the biggest degenerates to get quick loans legitimately now.

There's very little LCN activity down there. You do have guys like Joe Isgro and Tommy Gambino, but there's no LA family anymore. Isgro reports to Tommy Cacciopoli in NY and I wouldn't be surprised if Tommy G reports to Cali. You basically only have guys who belong to NY.

jerry heller mentions isgro in his book ruthless a memoir. go to page 167 for the start.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jsn3...gro&f=false

You see loansharking charges in LCN cases more than anyone else by far and they're usually connected to the gambling charges.

+1

Isgro was a promoter for some of Heller's artists for a while. They were friends at one point. Nicholson is another Isgro buddy. It's not really surprising to see those type of guys be friends with each other.

Nicholson is from the Jersey Shore originally...

Ever seen the movie 'American Me' ? features the beginning of La Eme/Mexican Mafia and their struggle with Jack Dragna, who poisened all the dope an killed a lot of hoods. I wonder if the LA family at one point controlled everything in LA until their decline like the Movie predicts.

I dunno if you guys agree but I think that the Major gambling, bookmaking and so on crimes that takes place in California is controlled by the Russian Mob.

No, the LA family never controlled all the city because first was ever a small family and dont had men for do this,second Mickey Cohen was a serious rival and the Outfit with Rosselli also had a share of the rackets so the family that was also famous like the Mickey mouse mafia after dragna dead begun to decline.

The Dragna family was serious players tho, much like The Tampa Mob at its time Roselli and other LCN crews who set up house had to respect them. And the mob has proven before that they don't need members to become powerful. I saw a documentary about prison gangs and one of the OG's said ''At the time Jack Dragna controlled most of the drugs in Los Angeles''. They don't need membership to boil over, they just need connections. He probably had connections with someone who made drugs and he distributed them to all the street gangs, hence the street gangs didn't want to fuck with them because he could cut them off. Then other gangs started to make connections with the Cartels and so on, and the mafia started to decline. I don't think it's so unlikely and Roselli was more like Bugsy than he was a Spilotro. He mostly focused on Union racketeering and Hollywood, just like he mostly focused on the Casinos when he was in vegas, and Roselli was more of a supporter and associate of Dragna, he worked with him as a close friend, altohugh he represented Chicago.

I'm not sure who the Italian boss was supposed to be in the movie but Dragna died in 1956. La Eme was officially founded a year later. I'm not sure how much interaction the LA family and the Mexicans ever had.



The last few big sports betting busts in California were the Macho Sports bust in 2013 (headed by some Peruvian guys but also had some Hispanics, whites, Asians, and Middle Easterners involved), another in 2015 that was headed by a guy from India and some whites (Irani), and another that was headed by David "Fat Dave" Stroj who had actually been caught up in Philadelphia mob "Delco Nostra" gambling case back in 2008. There were a variety of nationalities in these cases.

There was that Russian mob gambling case in 2013 that involved both high stakes poker games and sports betting in both New York and Los Angeles. This was the same operation that reports came out earlier in 2011 talking about poker games in LA that attracted a lot of celebrity players. Supposedly they ended in 2009 and the operation relocated to NY. Relatively speaking, Russian and other Eurasian crime groups aren't as involved in gambling as they are in fraud or some other crimes.

Did anything like that really happen? I researched that about a decade ago after rewatching American Me. Of course you got a lot of blog comment hearsay but nothing solid. The Mexican Mafia undoubtedly became a force on the Southern California streets through their taxation for protection on the inside. I've read that even the cartels had paid taxes to the Mexican Mafia for their safety on the inside. I can't imagine that being the case forever, however, as more Mexican nationals fill the prison systems and their numbers dominate the Mexican-American inmates.

I'm growing increasingly interested in 1940's Los Angeles. Siegel, Coen, The Dragna Family, The Zoot Suit Riots, Pachucos, Sleepy Lagoon, so freaking much was happening in LA at that time. Just the style, the cars, the music, the "noir", as it were. Really a fascination I can't keep up with.

Supposedly Joe peg leg Morgan had ties to some LCN as did a few other Eme members back in the 70s and 80s.
Ultimately I don't think much came of it.
The Eme didn't really reach its full power and reach until about 1993 when they convinced nearly every Southern California Chicano gang to pay taxes to them.
Before that, they were a feared and extremely violent prison gang that ran the inside of a prison. But most of them had no money and some even lived like bums on the outside. Some made money in the 1970s when they let a bunch of them out and they were shaking down small time dope dealers around LA among other things, but still amounted to a gang that just happened to be far more deadly than the average street gang.
After 93 the gang world changed a whole lot in California.

I would not go off of anything seen in the movie American Me. The movie simply has too many inaccuracies. Very, very loosely based on the real story. Made in a time when very little was known about the organization.

EME and the various cartels had an understanding and an alliance of sorts. Cartels didn't pay protection and in return EME profited from their connections across the border.

A few EME members had ties with NY mobsters who operated on the West Coast.

Joe Morgan had ties to a small cartel in Mexico. I believe it was a particular family. Morgan died in 1993, just around the time The Mexican Mafia started its strict extortion policy among Chicano gangs in southern California. Always found this to be interesting.

Don't really know how true this is. Even Jimmy Frattianno in the Last Mafioso book implies more so that Dragna answered to Roselli & Chicago. There was a point long after Dragna died where Roselli was transferred to the LA family and it was either Dragna or Milano, think it was Milano who needed Chicago's permission even though Roselli had been operating along with LA mobsters for years. According to Frattianno as well, toward the end, Roselli wanted to be transferred back to Chicago and he was simply waiting for Chicago to contact Brooklier that he was back under them.

And Frattiano also represented LA during Commission meetings with NY just to be involved in the Westchester theatre scam, even though Marston approached Frattiano himself for his involvement. Him and LA needed permission from NY despite Tommy Marston personally going to Fratianno askikg for his participation. Shows you the kind of power they had at that point. And also by Fratianno's accounts Siegel had free reign in LA. Dragna never liked that fact, but there was essentially little he could do about it.

SinatraClub, it was my understanding that it was Gagliano in New York, then Bonanno in New York, then Chicago. Today there is a couple of members and a few associates that do a few things there. A lot of the other families have things going on in that family. Even thought there are a lot of made men and associates in that city, most of them are retired.