The City of Rockford, in far northern Illinois, has been a hotbed of underworld activity since the 1920s. Located by the northern border of the state in Winnebago County, it is the fifth-largest city in the entire state outside of Chicago and is less than 100 miles from the “Windy City” itself.
Nicknamed “The Forest City” or “The Screw Capital of the World,” today, Rockford boasts a population just shy of 145,000 residents. With its outlying greater metropolitan area, the total population reaches almost 350,000.
It has been a vibrant city for over one hundred years. And with that bustling economy and population, typically always comes some form of organized crime as well.
They were no different. And yet for all its commerce and activity, Rockford, by and large, has been a hidden “gem” for the Italian Cosa Nostra for over 100 years.
A quiet little city hidden away on the map, where a small band of mafiosi have quietly plied their “stock in trade” of underworld rackets and underworld justice, meted out as dictated by their “Capo” when need be.
Since the earliest days of Prohibition, the city has been home to a tiny but highly well-organized and successful Mafia borgata that, at its peak, numbered no more than 20 to 30 inducted “made” members.
Unlike many of the other smaller Mafia Families throughout the country, Rockford, despite it size, has been able to do for far longer what many of its Cosa Nostra confederates in other cities, large and small, could not…and that was to survive!
Of the 26 original Cosa Nostra networks documented by the FBI in the United States, that had been organized and formed back in 1931, many became nearly extinct by the late 1970s to mid-1980s era.
