[Wallace T.]

Wasn't the Chicago Mafia, or the Outfit, different in some respects from their East Coast counterpart, centered around the Five Families in New York that were memorialized in The Godfather movies? The Chicago Mafia was not exclusively Sicilian or even Italian, and there were “made men” who were of Irish, Jewish, British, Polish, etc., ancestry. Also, on the East Coast, the Mafia's interest in labor unions, such as the Teamsters and the Longshoremen, were in direct conflict with the Commies. These unions were strongly anti-Communist, as was the American Federation of Labor generally. The tension between the gangsters and the Reds in the East does not seem to have been the case in Chicago or Detroit.

[muawiyah]

The Chicago mob always had a link to the Detroit mob. That group, in fact, owed it's existence to the Union Corse (Corsican Union) which first operated in New Orleans when it was still a Franco-Hispanic piece of the world, as was Detroit!

Given the dramatically fewer number of criminals in the Union Corse as compared to the East Coast mobs, it was necessary to "integrate" them at an early date.

You can think of Capone's operations in Chicago as an East Coast colony of the Sicilian mobs.

He had a difficult time with the Midwestern brand of mobsters and could have lost it had folks like Dillinger made a serious effort to dispose of him.