There are Mafia families that have bought magnificent houses on the North Shore, although not yet the great estates because they don't want that kind of high profile.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Mafia guys are all just insecure people who want their money. They're like little seven-year old kids when they don't get their way. I knew guys like that growing up in New Jersey.
I don't think estates are grim places.
Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.
My father's best friend, Georgie Terra, was an Italian guy. The children and the cousins and nieces and nephews were children of the Mafia. Those were the children he grew up with. If you want to go to a safe neighborhood, go to where the Mafia is.
I want to buy up a gang of properties in my neighborhood and give people the chance to live in new buildings. We should make our areas nice.
In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.
Many a family, in order to make a 'proper showing,' will commit itself for a larger and more expensive house than is needed, in an expensive neighborhood. Almost everyone would, it seems, like to keep up with the Joneses.
Wherever there's opportunity, the mafia will be there.
In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.
There are a lot of big spec houses now all across Connecticut, a lot of ostentatious showing of wealth.