This is an excerpt from the Smithsonian Magazine about the infamous meetings of Mafia Capos in Apalachin, Tioga County in New York on November 14, 1957.
“That meeting literally changed the course of history,” writes Michael Newton in The Mafia at Apalachin, 1957. The arrested men were soon recognized as powerful members of the Mafia, having gathered to discuss the logistics and control of their criminal syndicate. The aftershocks of the raid at Apalachin upended the criminal justice system, forced the Department of Justice to revise their policies, and proved to the American public that the Mafia, whose existence the FBI had vehemently denied, was real. All while spending decades building up legitimate businesses, these mafiosi engaged in racketeering, loansharking, narcotics distribution and bribing public officials.
See that? It is 1957 and the official position of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was that the Mafia did not exist, even though at this time, there has been plenty of evidence otherwise for at least the previous 5 decades.
A newspaper clip from July 9, 1901.
Some of the most notorious cases of extorsion come from the Mafia’s custom of setting tenements on fire as reprisal against those building owners who did not pay for the privilege of being “protected by the thugs. Unfortunately, several times the poor people living inside at the time of the fire, did not have chance to get out and perished in the flames, some of the “incendiary fires” would be classified today as Mass Murder.
The FBI is founded on July 26, 1908, well after the Mafia had hit the papers plenty, but it takes it almost 5 decades to acknowledge there is a Mafia in the United States. Do you think I give any seriousness at the actual director of the agency discarding Antifa’s threat and characterizing “White Supremacists” as a bigger threat?
And if you think going back over a century does not mean much, I remind you of a closer fuck up by the FBI and other agencies not recognizing and acting upon threats they had info about and resulted in catastrophic consequences. You may have heard about a event called the terrorists attacks of September 11, 2001?
PS: And if you are thinking about I left out the infamous Italian Black Hand, you are right, I did. They go back at least till the mid 1890s, but I left them out to concentrate just on the Mafia as mentioned in the papers. I did not want to get too longwinded explaining both criminal enterprises.
Three alternatives to ponder:
– the FBI is correct and the threat is white supremacists;
– the FBI is honestly mistaken about the relative threat; and
– the FBI is dishonest about the relative threat.
As always, ask who benefits, and how, in each scenario.
Also worth asking, could we be wrong and the threat really is white nationalists, and if so, what are the implications.
FBI targeted a sitting president, so….
@boris I believe your three options are incorrectly stated. The problem is the term “white supremacists”. Now it is the case that one man (army of one) can do a huge amount of damage, just look at the bombing of the federal building, it is avoiding the actual risk assessment.
1. Who is likely to perform the violence?
2. How much damage will be done by the violence?
3. To what group/belief system does that person that performs the violence with great affect belong to?
We can look at the reporting from the biased media and easily detect that most of the violence is coming from LARPing left wing activists. (ANTIFA/BLM)
We can look and see that those people have done a great deal of damage to buildings that are undefended. Less so to defended buildings. And almost no damage to areas that are defended by police and the courts (DA’s actually charge and prosecute)
Those people we see performing most of the violence are from the left.
BUT, and this is the real concern, in my opinion, who is going to be most effective at the violence performed? This is what the report that was leaked to Politico was talking about. While fully half of all “terrorist” events were done by left leaning groups, more than 90% of the fatalities were attributed to the right leaning groups.
When the light switch is turned on, the people on the right are not going to be messing around and they will cause damage to those on the left they hold responsible.
The Secret Service does a great job of protecting the President. They deal with the loony-toons that threaten him every day. But those loony-toons are just not that big of a threat. They are vocal and stupid.
Piss of one Chris Kyle trained person who decides to “do something about it”, they are not going to be making noise on blogs (opsec), they are not going to be talking to friends about it (humint), they are not going to suddenly change how they act (humint, sigint, opsec). They are just going to do it.
And that is terrifying to people in the DHS. Those people are almost impossible to predict and stop. The best they can do is make it difficult for that sort of person *IN GENERAL* to achieve their goals. I.e. Make sure there are no sniper hides available, make sure there is bullet resistant glass between possible shooters and the protectee, make sure there is a food taster, make sure every package is scanned and opened away from the principle.
They are not going to stop that person, they are going to make it difficult. And that makes that sort of person more of a threat than a bunch of wanna-be LARPers.
What I am wondering about is why they all are trying so hard to divert our attention from the real thing that seems to be happening right now.
There is a phrase I vaguely remember from my childhood : revolutionary terror. What I see today appears eerily similar to the descriptions I heard then.
There is a good read about this (I do not agree with everything said, but it gives a comprehensive outline)
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
According to the FBI, based on what my lying eyes are telling me, “white supremacists” wear black “uniforms” including helmets, carry BLM signs, throw Molotov cocktails, attack police, beat up anyone perceived as a Trump supporter or an independent videographer, burn buildings and are comprised of both white and black members. They get well known rich liberals like Soros, et. al. to fund supplies for their riots, bail for arrested agitators and travel for their organizers. Either the FBI managed to suss out the greatest con game since the Reichstag fire, or they are lying to the American people yet again.
Tell me again why we need the FBI. What do they do that can’t be done by other law enforcement agencies?
A related question is “tell me where in the Constitution it says that the FBI is allowed to exist?”
As for threat assessment, there are two concerns. One is the potential damage (death, maiming, and property loss) from terrorism. For those, the #1 threat is clearly islamic terrorism. Whether lone wolf non-leftist attackers (like the OK City bombers), or Antifa/BLM, are the #2 threat is not entirely clear. By property damage, it’s clearly Antifa.
The other concern is the danger to the Republic. There the answer is: Antifa is #1 by an overwhelming margin. They and they alone aim to overthrow the Constitutional order. A few tattooed nazi nutcases may kill and destroy, but their political impact is nonexistent.