Why Everyone In Missouri Ignores the Mob
When multiple criminal syndicates operate on top of each other, everyone is afraid to interrupt someone else's hustle
In our last episode, we discussed how the Missouri Mob(s) just shanked Sarah Unsicker because she is extremely rude and notices organized crime. That is a characteristic I actually want in an Attorney General. Criminals, by contrast, find it awkward.
Apparently, none of the leadership in Missouri is willing to discuss organized crime. You could hear a pin drop when I testified in October of 2021 about how the state’s propensity toward losing foster kids helped human traffickers.
Props to former Rep. Dottie Bailey, who was actually concerned about the Mob victimizing Missouri kids. Her questions were quickly shut down by now-Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman, but at least Bailey was curious.
Not everyone is as interested in an honest discussion. Here is a campaign trail audio recording of Elad Gross, a candidate for Attorney General of Missouri, from around October 30, 2023. Gross was asked directly about his assessment of organized crime in the state and his first response was “It’s not as bad as it used to be. It used to be, like, Tommy guns in the street.”
That is not, in my opinion, a very perspicacious threat assessment.
From May 1, 2022, through May 1, 2023, the Drug Enforcement Agency division in St. Louis seized 100 pounds of Fentanyl powder, approximately enough to kill 50 million Americans.
According to the DEA, Fentanyl is almost exclusively distributed by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels of Mexico which both have backing from the Chinese Communist Party.
Further, the Sinaloa Cartel is armed with military-grade spyware from Israel.
The fact that, in one year, organized crime syndicates around St. Louis gathered up the capacity to murder 18% of the U.S. population strongly contradicts the assertion that the Mob is “not as bad as it used to be.”
Multiple Mob amnesia
Why is it acceptable for a political candidate to claim that organized crime was at its peak during the era of the 1921 Thompson submachine gun, and not today, as the facts would indicate?
First, you can generally blame Martin Scorsese, whose films are beautiful, brilliant pieces of propaganda designed to fix organized crime in a certain time, place, and ethnicity. If you watch the Scorsese movies, organized crime is from the early 20th Century; it’s in mainly in New York and Las Vegas; it’s mostly Italian. This isn’t universally true for his films, which also deal with the Boston rackets and a crude stereotype of Whitey Bulger, but the public generally sees the mafia through the lens of Goodfellas and Casino, which is inaccurate.
That’s not the most important reason people in Missouri tend not to discuss organized crime. More often, not talking about the Mob is extremely important when there are multiple criminal syndicates in the same place, and you don’t know who is who. It is inconvenient—if not dangerous—to discuss someone else’s criminal activities out loud, most of all if you are not part of their network. You may be getting someone in trouble, and the lack of appreciation from those people may be very painful.
Here is a counter-example. In Johnston, Rhode Island, Brockton, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire, some years ago, you actually might have heard people refer to their own family members as “small-time New England Mob.” As in, a regular person may have casually mentioned that their own brother owned a bar in one of these locations, and was associated with the Mob. The “small-time” prefix was to indicate that there were many, many such cases. It wasn’t much of a secret, therefore the FBI would have had scant interest in such activity. I’m not saying that these New Englanders were necessarily more honest than their Midwestern counterparts, but rather that the situation is different. Those organized crime networks in New England were generally outcroppings of the Genovese or the Winter Hill-Irish types. Sure, the Russians and Chinese were making inroads, especially through the Portuguese. But otherwise, there were not the logistical networks laying on top of each other like there are in Missouri. Because of the lack of dynamics, people were less touchy.
In Missouri, however, the transnational organized crime syndicates are numerous, and the civilians of the state have learned not to discuss any of them lest they make strangers suddenly angry. Sure, if you actually have an Italian last name in St. Louis and you grew up on The Hill, you might make a reference to your father knowing someone whose car blew up in the 1980s on the highway. But that is when those stories end. The wall of silence begins around any story in the 1990s or later.
Of course, the 1990s is when organized crime in Missouri became very global and very interesting. The Chinese, with lots of Israeli help, moved into the Las Vegas casinos that fed cash to Kansas City and St. Louis.
War in the former Yugoslavia relocated Bosnians to St. Louis. The Bosnian Mob came with them, along with ample connections to the Russian Mafiya.
The Tijuana Cartel was overtaken by the Sinaloa Cartel in the 2000s, which then extended their reach from the desert southwest all the way to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The Sinaloa are equally dangerous in arms trafficking, drugs, and human trafficking.
The Russians extended into taxis and human trafficking in Missouri, commingling with the Dixie Mafia, which used to be banished from the state by the Chicago Outfit.
It probably wouldn’t surprise you that the only people who are aware of all those organized crime syndicates at the same time are either in national security or work for the Mob itself. Keeping tabs on the Sinaloa, Jalisco, MS-13, various biker gangs, and Russians is a full-time job—and a dangerous one. Thus, when anybody brings up organized crime, it is much safer for civilians to say that they don’t understand nothin’ lest they report any detail which might get someone in trouble. It’s all a conspiracy theory, you see! This reflex evidently applies all the way up to candidates for statewide office.
And that is a problem. While the ignorance/amnesia reflex may make sense on a microeconomic basis for individuals, it is no way to run a society. At some point, the networks that traffic Fentanyl and toddlers need to all be shut down. Criminals are not going to like it. It will be rude. They will be quite offended. And Federal prosecutions are, no doubt, upsetting. But we cannot tolerate chemical weapons in the Midwest any more.
So all of this will change.