Re: OG Mobsters Complain About GenZ Mafiosi

On Feb 12, 2025 at 10:05:46 PM PST, "Ed Stasiak"
<user1263@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:

 

 BTR1701
 
 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/11/italy-mafia-poor-recruits-dawn-raids-siciliy-cosa-nostra/

 
Paywall, can you post the article?

Mafia godfathers in Sicily have been caught on wiretaps lamenting the
"miserable calibre" of new recruits as nearly 150 alleged criminals were
arrested in dawn raids involving 1,200 police officers.

Crime bosses from Cosa Nostra, the Italian island's notorious mafia,
unfavourably compared the new generation of mafiosi to those of the past,
invoking the example of THE GODFATHER, the classic 1972 film starring Marlon
Brando as the Sicilian-American patriarch Don Corleone.

They said that, unlike their predecessors, new recruits are too quick to turn
"pentito"-- or state witness-- as soon as they are arrested.

"The calibre these days is low, a miserable level," Giancarlo Romano, an
alleged mafia don, said in an intercepted conversation.

"If you watch THE GODFATHER, the connections he had... he was very influential
because of the power that he built at a political level. But us – what can we
do? We're on our knees, guys. We think we do business, but these days it's
others who do it. We used to be number one, now it’s others... we're no better
than gypsies."

He told one young recruit: "You should go to school – that way you will meet
doctors, lawyers, the people who actually run Italy, Europe."

Telephone intercepts also revealed the nicknames by which godfathers refer to
each other, from Spiderman and Robert De Niro to Bear and Nephew.