Glossary entry
Crew
KROO
Definition
KROO
The working unit of a family. A capo, the soldiers who report to him, and the larger number of associates who do most of the actual earning.
“The Elizabeth crew handled the construction locals and answered to nobody else in the family.”
A family is an administrative fiction most of the time. The crew is the thing that exists: five to twenty soldiers under a capo, working a defined territory or a defined racket, with a ring of associates around them who are not members and never will be.
Money moves up through it and protection moves down. A soldier earns on his own account, passes a share to his capo, and in return is entitled to have his disputes heard and his operations left alone by anyone else in the family.
The arrangement also compartmentalises the organisation. A soldier generally knows his own crew and very little beyond it, which is why arresting one produced so little before the racketeering statutes made the whole structure chargeable as a single enterprise.