Anyone who has reached a certain age knows that there are full-sized humans who do things differently than they ever did. Just today, I happened to be in the city on the subway and was surrounded by people who had their heads down and were peering into their phones. Some were even talking into them. Facebook must have been back up.
It wasn't until the NYT reporter Corey Kilgannon (@coreykilgannon) retweeted an out take someone made from the story and commented that the younger mobsters reliance on wireless technology to deliver threatening messages has deviated greatly from plopping a dead fish wrapped in newspaper on the bar as their way of saying that future breaths were going to be taken underwater, but for a short time only.
Think of it. Where would a millennial mobster get a dead fish these days anyway? Online from Fresh Direct? Would it get delivered on time?
The A-Hed piece even reveals that younger mobsters just plain don't kill others the way dad and Uncle Nutso did. "They certainly don't kill people like they used to," said Michael Gaeta, a former FBI agent who investigated organized crime for 12 years. "It attracts too much heat."
Too much heat and probably too many funerals to attend. And all those flowers. Who wants to show id to get all that Claritin these days to stem the tide of sneezing in the funeral homes?
Let's analyze a text from a young mobster to an union official that has become part of a court record.
"Hey [sic] this is the 2nd text, there isnt [sic] going to be a 3rd."
We can't tell if the phone's software created the ordinal numbers, or they were typed in on purpose, but their use is admirable. And no misspellings. The comma is missing after Hey, but commas are harder to understand than the tax code. And they ducked the apostrophe in isn't, choosing not to go to another panel of special characters, but no one knows how to use an apostrophe these days anyway.
Aside from the younger generation's use of technology that wasn't widely available even 20 years ago, there is the matter of the organization of organized crime. They need consultants.
The old guys who somehow were not eliminated in sweeping outplacement policy purges, just plain don't go off into a polyester tracksuit haven in Florida anymore and leave the youngsters in charge. There is no smooth transition of power. No succession plan.
One of the immediate contrasts between John Lindsay when he be came mayor of NYC after the three-term Mayor Robert Wagner was his immediate use of hiring consultants from the Rand Corporation to reorganize the massive city agencies that stretched across the five boroughs.
Whether anyone thinks things were improved is a matter for another story, but it sounds like Organized Crime needs some outside advice on how to run things.
It is not likely to happen, because what set of consultants wants a report with their name on it telling the five New York families how to run things? The columnist Jimmy Breslin would have done it for free, but he passed away.
Jimmy of course wrote the bestseller about the Boys from Brooklyn in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. It now sounds like aimed weaponry isn't their problem. They're the Gang That Can't Think Straight.
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