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Mob hits

DiFenucci

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Mob hits
Works for other OC scenes, too.

Take this info as you like, I realized it's more informative than it is useful. But it's something different than the usual guide on 'how' to RP a mobster. I hope this helps ruling out useless DM-fests between OC factions.

Watch-A-Broad-Daylight-Mob-Hit-In-the-Bronx.jpg

Man shot in botched mob hit in the Bronx, things like these aren't as common in 2019 as they were in the twentieth century and early twenty-first.



Why do people get whacked?

Most Mafia hits are made against people who have some connection to the Mafia. Not always but usually, the hit is a way to exert discipline for breaking some rule. Therefore, the victim has social connections to the Mafia. Thus the signature move is that a person with a close connection, the closer the better, will do the hit or help the killers set up the victim. It usually won't be some anonymous stranger that pulls the trigger, it will be a “friend” who has been ordered to kill. To disobey such an order is to sign your own death warrant. For instance, when Jimmy Hoffa, the union leader, disappeared near Detroit, he was meeting people he knew and had a long relationship with for a meeting. He trusted someone(s) and that person or those persons betrayed his trust to set him up for the kill. This is the signature Mafia move for a hit. Mob guys must have had a lot of ulcers back in the killing days because they never knew who they could trust. Widespread hits ceased around 2005. The killings set the killers up for life or decades long prison terms when caught and convicted. This led to many criminals turning states evidence against Mafia leaders, rather than spending the rest of their lives in prison. Too many American Mafia leaders were ending up in prison for life because of the killing, so now the Mafia seldom kills someone. Instead, they will order that people be shunned, so they lose their network of associates and have a difficult time making a living as a criminal. But sometimes, it still happens.

What makes a hitter?

In order to grasp what makes a hitter it helps to understand that there is sort of an odd admixture of people that function as “hit men”. First, just about every “Made Man” in the mob is on the hook to carry out hits if a superior sanctions a hit. Using your soldiers is obviously the more cost-effective. But people that are even made soldiers in the mob vary widely by what their role in their family or crew is supposed to be and what they do as members of a crew, or have members of their own crew that report to them do. (While the term “soldier” has a connotation of a rather lowly grunt, Made Men are in fact all executives that have paid dues to be there, and it is typical for a Made Man to be a member of a crew headed by a Caporegime or more commonly “Capo”, which almost seems to suggest the cognate of Capo to be Captain, and then heading his own crew where he will functionally be kind of a Capo, but still must act as member of crew, and do what they are told to do.)

So while it is easy to fob off a hit job on crew member, that is not without risks or problems. First of all, if you crew guy is a good “earner” for the crew, unless he is enthusiastic about taking on Wet Work (and some are) and has experience in it, using a relatively non-violent, inexperienced crewman can lead to bad fallout that could bring down the greater part of a family. So, in the mob there are guys that are not really very great earners, but a reasonably good killers.. They will get a lot of work under certain circumstances. But being a good killer in the mob is a pretty low status thing, maybe because as organizations go, Cosa Nostra (notice the ungrammatical “La” is omitted. The phrase The Our Thing doesn’t sound any better in Italian than in English) is pretty rife with killers. Besides, as one former Button (Made) Man related, getting tarred with the “Hit Man” brush can stall your career. You can make a quick buck, but the skipper that gave you the contract will basically think of you as a hired gun, (a cost center to him), and hired guns have to be paid, whereas in the mob, the goal is to have your underlings make lots of money and kick-up money to you. So, yeah, it kind like a multi-level marketing structure. Anyhow, this Button realized after he did his first piece of “work” (a hit) that if he took payment, then that was what he was going to be to his Capo. Also, this hit was pretty strategically valuable, so when the next meeting took place, the Capo pushed an envelope full of money in front this Button, who slid it back to the Capo, basically saying fuhgetaboutit, a favor for a friend. That signaled that the Button was looking to be a serious player, not just a thug.

As far as what takes place with Mob killings, the Life is truly a horror show made manifest. The mob, basically making it a statement about all criminal organizations, is second only to the Third Reich in terms of sheer brutality, though it could scarcely match it in number. Mob hits can vary widely, ranging from the old Tommy Gun Spray-and-Pray, to slow elaborate tortures involving electricity and rats.


Real examples

One of the most fascinating stories is that of Richard Kuklinski, one of the Mob’s most prolific hitman, who also doubled on the side as a serial killer. (Talk about taking your work home with you.) In the book his Kuklinski basically describes his life as a Mob hitman, as a specialist in making people dissapear or die a very slow, agonizing death custom ordered for that particular hit. He was, in short, an absolute monster of a human being. He gleefully discusses about his method for strangling someone to death (basically Hang them by hoisting them over your shoulder onto your back once the victim was noosed. Oh did I fail to mention? Richard was huge.) He did his first killing that way on a random stranger that was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, just to see if it worked. Likewise, he once decapitated a random driver by pulling up next to the victim in traffic and fired a double-barrelled sawed-off shotgun at point blank range. You can go onto YouTube and watch this guy drool about his past deeds. He just loved the fact that a shotgun could take someones head off entirely. Can’t think it was much of surprise.

The biggest problem with reading about Kuklinski is there are a rather large batches of chaff that came along with the wheat. Once he was caught, and he knew his freedom was permanently forfeit, he clearly decided that he wanted to be know as thee Bad-Ass Hit Man of all time. So he started taking credit for being part of all the major mob hits including Bonnano Boss wannabe Carmine Galante and “Big Paul” Castallano. At this point it starts to get hard to know what to believe. He even claimed to have done in the guy I will discuss next, and that one we know he had nothing to do with. I don’t mind having to sift through a lot of gore to get to the heart of a good story, but it gets to be a bit more of a chore when you’re not sure half the time if you are being bullshitted or not.

Another version of the Mob Hit-Monster was Roy Demeo, a Made Man with the Gambino family, who literally ran a production-line of murder and death. His Gemini Lounge crew had perfected a method for regular murdering, dimembering, and disposing of victims. Numbers are estimated that the Demeo crew kill well over a hundred people, and may that number may have been in the hundreds. For a time, the Mob loved the guy because he was a great earner, did custom high-end car thefts and chop-shopping cars by the hundreds. So he made money and made problems go away for Mafia higher-ups. (He also helped sponsor the induction into the mob of the Irish Westies, thugs from the Bowery that had earned the respect of the Gambinos and were brought into the borgata with almost full-member rights for some of them. It was probably one of the most successful inter-ethnic deals made by the Mob. While associates (non-members, often ineligible, are common if not really the rule rather than the exception) are everywhere, you have to have some serious pull to get your non-Italian/Sicilian crew treated almost as if they were Button Men. At least the leadership of the Westies were regarded that way, James Coonan apparently went full Wise-Guy after the switch, much to the disgust of many Westies that although loved the business the new partnership has affording, had no intention of being Greaseball Goombahs (from their point of view) either. In any case, Roy himself was ultimately whacked for some serious misjudgements during interaction with Drug Cartel people. (He allowed himself to be talked into leaving a body “as a warning” that came back to haunt him.) You live by the sword…


Concluding

If you read the stories of Kuklinski and Demeo it becomes quickly apparent that despite the love that Hollywood gives Hitman characters, on the whole, theirs is a dirty job done by some seriously messed-up people. It is not glamorous, cool, fun, or any of the other things the movies like to pretend it is. It’s nasty, brutal, bloody, horrendous work that can’t help but permanently damage anyone who has the misfortune of having to do this deeds, however voluntarily.

However, it is still fun to roleplay.
 
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