Meanwhile, the Smaldone brothers, with several of their relatives and associates rose to power in the mid-1930s. They took control of mob operations in the City of Denver after killing off a few rivals. Starting out as alcohol bootleggers, they also ran an organized car theft ring and committed the occasional heist.
The countrified, wide-open, rural state of Colorado seems like a very unlikely place to find members of the dreaded Sicilian Mafia, but sometimes the truth can be stranger than fiction. The very thought of Italian-speaking gangsters wearing fedoras and sharkskin suits, carrying Tommy-Guns in violin cases seems strangely out of place in this Rocky Mountain territory.
