Is He Really Gone?

The Wednesday night murder of Nicolo Rizzuto in Montreal has prompted a lot of talk that the Rizzuto Mafia "family" is finished.  It's a reasonable assumption given that his son Vito, the reputed boss of the Rizzuto organisation, is currently serving a 10 year sentence in US jail.  The elder Rizzuto's murder caps off more than a year of murders of Rizzuto members, including his grandson Nick Jr. last fall.  But the fate of one major player remains unknown, that of Paolo Renda.  Renda, Vito's brother in law and reputed consigliere, was apparently kidnapped in May of this year, his car being found with the windows open and the keys in the ignition.  The presumption is of course that he too was murdered.  But I couldn't help but wonder tonight if that was the case.  Could it be that Renda is alive and well living under an assumed name as part of some sort of deal with the authorties to provide information, thereby avoiding prosecution?  Modern Mafiosi have a penchant for squealing their heads off when things get too tough.  For that matter maybe Renda disappeared himself, figuring a life in hiding was a preferable alternative to taking a bullet from whichever group of enemies has been targetting the Rizzutos.

Beware the Maggia!

If you're not a Marvel Comics reader, or former reader, you're probably thinking "What the hell is Gueguen going on about this time? Is that some weird mispronunciation of Mafia?" Not in the Marvel universe, dear friends. Since the mid 1960s the Maggia has been Marvel's stand in for the Mob, although apparently the "real" Mafia also turns up these days as well. Reading some old comics tonight I got thinking about the Maggia and how it came about. I'd kind of suspected for a while that Marvel didn't want to get in trouble with the Mafia by using it in comic books, and apparently Stan Lee admitted this in an interview in recent years. It certainly makes sense given that Marvel's editorial offices were, as they are now, located in New York, and I would assume their printing was done in New York in those days as well. So, given the Mafia role in a lot of New York business at the time, it's not hard to imagine Stan and company not wanted to cause trouble for themselves by doing something to piss them off in a comic story, even if it was more likely to be deliveries being slowed up by Mob controlled trucking firms than wiseguys threatening to feed Stan to the fishes or something equally cliche.

Incidentally the Maggia first appeared way back in The Avengers #13, as did Maggia boss Count Nefaria. Yeah, Lee was real subtle with that name, wasn't he?

The Sixth Family Under Attack.

As Canadian readers may have heard by the time they read this police have launched a major series of raids against figures in Montreal's "traditional" organised crime community. This includes senior mob figure Nick Rizzuto. Anyone interested in more background on this situation might want to check out The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto by Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys. Lamothe and Humphreys present the history of the Rizzuto family's rise to the top of Canadian organised crime, and argue that it should be considered the Sixth Family of North American organised crime alongside the infamous Five Families of New York's Mafia community. Vito Rizzuto is currently in an American jail for his alleged role in the murder of several New York mobsters in 1981, an event detailed in the book and also presented in the Johnny Depp film Donnie Brasco.