I spent a fun few hours a couple years back deep diving into what has become of the old-school "Goodfellas"-style mob these days. Looking into both media reports as well as posts by 'mob fans' - niche forums of those who obsessively follow mob and mob adjacent activities via open-source intel methods - I got the sense the traditional Italian mob families have indeed shrunk to a smaller, sadder version of what they once were due to being eclipsed by new, different kinds of organized crime.
Guys who are known "made men" getting out of prison after doing 10-15 and then ending up doing relatively nickel and dime crimes like daylight armed robbery of a jewelry store themselves for lack of enough income. 25 years ago guys like that wouldn't normally do that stuff themselves. Others have even sunk to basically LARPing being old-school mobsters on social media.
It seems there are two key drivers behind the decline: the real money in organized crime has shifted to new kinds of activities which scale better and can grow much larger. That's attracted new competitors. Some are smarter, some more brutal and some which are both. There's also an aspect that these new, bigger opportunities are far more complex, long-term and can also require successfully operating legitimate businesses as one necessary component. I guess it's not surprising. Even illicit industries undergo accelerating change over time. The old crime families still exist and can certainly still be dangerous - they're just no longer the top of the criminal food chain in terms of earnings.
I spent a fun few hours a couple years back deep diving into what has become of the old-school "Goodfellas"-style mob these days. Looking into both media reports as well as posts by 'mob fans' - niche forums of those who obsessively follow mob and mob adjacent activities via open-source intel methods - I got the sense the traditional Italian mob families have indeed shrunk to a smaller, sadder version of what they once were due to being eclipsed by new, different kinds of organized crime.
Guys who are known "made men" getting out of prison after doing 10-15 and then ending up doing relatively nickel and dime crimes like daylight armed robbery of a jewelry store themselves for lack of enough income. 25 years ago guys like that wouldn't normally do that stuff themselves. Others have even sunk to basically LARPing being old-school mobsters on social media.
It seems there are two key drivers behind the decline: the real money in organized crime has shifted to new kinds of activities which scale better and can grow much larger. That's attracted new competitors. Some are smarter, some more brutal and some which are both. There's also an aspect that these new, bigger opportunities are far more complex, long-term and can also require successfully operating legitimate businesses as one necessary component. I guess it's not surprising. Even illicit industries undergo accelerating change over time. The old crime families still exist and can certainly still be dangerous - they're just no longer the top of the criminal food chain in terms of earnings.