Word on the Street

Word on the Street: Why the Mob

One question that I get pretty often. Why write about the Mob? Aren’t they a force from the past? Organized crime is a problem from the past, present, and future. However, the romance surrounding them from my childhood is now a thing of the past. When I was a child, the priest for our small mission parish took the news of my mother and what she could do with a tax form to some people he knew in Louisville. Those people then passed the information upstream until it was caught by some gentlemen from Chicago with shiny shoes. When they rolled up on my family’s little backwater Kentucky town, they made such a splash that they set my imagination flying. When they offered my mother a job, my dream went even further, and the idea of Josie was born. My mother turned down the job, but the idea of what could have been has stuck with me for almost fifty years.