In the earlier seasons Tony steals US goods and sells them to the Camorra in Naples and even imports Furio to work for him for a while. I've never heard of this type of arrangement in any real life mafia stories, particularly more recent one. Perhaps way back during the days of prohibition it was prevalent, but I would think that with the FBI already snooping under Tony's skirt it would be VERY difficult to do what he was doing.
shareI think the stealing cars and selling them overseas does seem a little far-fetched. But in the last season, there were a few times when they imported hit men from the old country to bump off someone. Recall that was how they killed Phil Leotardo's mistress and her father by accident. Also that was how they killed off Rusty Millio (Frankie Vallie).
shareYeah, the whole system of them importing "zips" to do the dirty work. Even that seemed far fetched because of the sloppy way in which it was handled, especially with Chris using that heroin addict as the intermediary and then the zips kill the wrong people. WTF?
shareLook up "The Pizza Connection" trial -- dozens of Sicilians busted in the US using pizza parlors as a front for narcotics distribution. It actually did happen that Italian nationals came to the US to work with the US mafia.
That being said, I don't think the Sopranos had the size/status to really attract the interests of Italian mafia groups. I also think there would have been more stringent immigration scrutiny of Italian immigrants, especially if they had criminal records.
Exporting stolen cars doesn't seem unrealistic either, but not for Tony directly. I'd imagine there would have been someone who specialized in the shipping/export side and Tony would have just supplied the cars.
Yes, I can see the Soprano crew working with a crooked exporter who already has the shippers and docking schematics lined up. The TV series never showed us the details but there were several episodes where they talked about their relationship with the Dockers/Longshoremen stealing freighters of DVDs, clothing, HDTVs,. etc.
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