Rancid wrote:I agree with @Potemkin.
Epstein was not familia (I think it's famiglia in Italian?). Thus, will is disposable to the mafia.
Sidenote, the mafia is far less violent today than it was in the past. They are better at keeping their business quiet. They are also good at skirting the grey area between what is a legal business and what is an illegal business.
In short, they are much smarter these days.
Cosa nostra is underground.
Indeed. In fact, the Mafia was at its most violent at the very beginning, when it was founded in New York back in the 1890s/1900s. When Lucky Luciano and his allies took over organised crime in 1931, one of their first major reforms was to
decrease the amount of violence used. Luciano would rather bribe people than whack them. In fact, he forced Lupo "the Wolf", who had co-founded the American-Sicilian Mafia with Giuseppe Morello back in the mid-1890s, to retire from the rackets in 1931, because Lupo was too notorious as a prolific killer - he didn't fit in with the "kinder, gentler" image of the Mafia which Luciano was touting. Back in the 1900s, people would cross themselves whenever Lupo's name was mentioned. He is known to have personally killed almost a hundred people, most of them for no very good reason. The "Moustache Petes" were so hated by Luciano and his allies precisely because of their propensity for senseless and prolific violence.
Every time the Mafia has morphed into a new form, it has tended to become
less violent, not more. The reason for this is simple - violence and gang wars are simply bad for business.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Marx (Groucho)