This is the fourth installment in Button Guys’ continuing series about mobsters, racketeers, and organized crime figures who lived and operated over the years in South Florida. In our three previous installments, we documented over 300 organized crime figures from across the United States who either vacationed periodically or migrated permanently down to Florida, most of whom brought their underworld rackets and criminal proclivities along with them.
We now name even more mob figures. Both the notorious and the not-so-notorious. They were a diverse bunch who came from New York, New Jersey, New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and on occasion, even as far away as the west coast in California.
To make for easier reading, Button Guys broke each of them down, listing them family by family, state by state, all through the United States. Mob guys, who, at one time or another, chose to visit or reside in the State of Florida.
And aside from the more traditional racket activities they ran such as gambling and loansharking, extortion, and the smuggling of narcotics, South Florida’s mob guys were an ever-resourceful bunch.
Note: For additional stories about the mob in South Florida (a continuation of this series), please see Mafia Moon Over Miami Part 1, Mafia Moon Over Miami: Part 2, and Mafia Moon Over Miami: Part 3. In addition, throughout the Button Guys website, you can find more detailed biographies about many of the mobsters listed below.
By the mid-1960s, the Sheriff’s Offices of both Dade and Broward Counties had uncovered ample evidence indicating that through a variety of methods, Cosa Nostra figures and their associates had infiltrated numerous legitimate and quasi-legit businesses and were now perpetrating such sophisticated business “oriented” fraudulent criminal activities as insurance fraud, mortgage and bank fraud, construction fraud, credit card fraud, running monopolistic trade associations, factoring companies that served as fronts for usurious lending, garbage disposal rackets, jukebox and coin machine rackets…and much more.
