How did huge mob bosses that “everybody knew” was a mob boss, or criminal running the place, etc, get away with it?
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Well the truth is that it’s not so black and white. What defines a “mob” or a “Mob boss”? An organization whos members commit crimes and the person who owns that organization? AKA *every* powerful company and country in the world? If you become powerful enough, the only reason you aren’t considered a criminal is because no one is strong enough to arrest you. The people we see as historical titans of industry and heroes of capitalism or revolutionaries are just the crime bosses who won. The ones who we see as archetypal villains are the ones who lost, but in a lot of cases it might have gone the other way. Butterfly flaps its wings, someone steps on a bug, and al Capone could have been remembered as an American hero.
Also, from another perspective, there are gradients of legitimacy from being squeaky clean to dirty as can be, and we live in a world of billions of people remember, thats a lot. At every point along that gradient there are people who plant the flag of their organization, and that represents how far that individual is willing to push morals, social norms, and the law in orger for their organization to succeed. With so many people in the world, there are always plenty of people who push things to the very edge as far as they can go without getting caught, and that’s where the anthropic principle kicks in. Its common curiosity to ask “What is the person who pushed the law the hardest and got away with the most? And how did they do it?”. We intentionally seek out stories and edge cases where people walk the line between legitimacy and criminality because those cases are interesting, not because they are common. For every “Mob boss” who got away with it for so long, there’s a 100 who immediately got killed or arrested. When you have 100 people commiting crimes at 100 to 1 odds of being caught, then that means 1 person is not gonna get caught, and theirs is the story we’re most curious to hear, so we culturally spread tons of stories about all the criminals that got away.
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