As exemplified by the story we're commenting on, in the heyday of top-down large-scale organized crime, mob hits were a commonplace. We have RICO today because he violence, over the preceding 50 years, had gotten way out of hand. We have violence in Chicago today --- more than we had in the 1970s! --- but we don't so much have mob hits. An organized crime operation, protected by violence, run out of the Cook Country Democratic "Machine" would be one of the best kept secrets in the country. People would semiregularly get killed to keep it. But that doesn't happen.

I'm sure there's a lot of graft and corruption. There is everywhere we have single-party rule. But the "Democratic Machine" is not an Outfit-style criminal organization.