A Button Guys Exclusive Series
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.
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.
Through strong-arm tactics, legitimately buying into, or opening up new companies, the mob had successfully infiltrated such important business sectors as trucking, private waste collection, banking, automobile leasing agencies, second-mortgage and factoring firms, real estate and land development, the entertainment field, garment manufacturing, major hotels and smaller motels alike, and a myriad of other local industries.
Local authorities were also becoming more and more concerned about reports that Mafia figures were now bribing members of the Miami Police Department and Dade County public officials in order to coerce and corrupt local government administration.
The list below names another 53 mob figures and their criminal associates from 14 separate Cosa Nostra networks, that we found to be operating in South Florida.
These organized crime figures are in addition to the more than 307 underworld figures Button Guys previously profiled in three earlier installments of our “Mafia Moon Over Miami” series.
A total of over 358 Cosa Nostra figures and their aides have been identified. And still, this is just a drop in the bucket of the many thousands of other hoodlums who made South Florida their home and playground through the years.
Just Call ‘Em the Sunshine Mob!
