History **of Note** While the Wise Guys are fond of claiming their history dates all the way back to the Middle Ages, working for the earliest glimmers of the Maltese crime lords; as anorganization they have only existedwithinthe last century. There have beenGarou withinour tribe that used criminal action to fund their activity no doubt since before recorded history, and it is highly probable some of them did work for the 15th century Mafiosos. But there is no evidence to suggest they had any link to the modem camp known as the Wise Guys beyond a similar tie with a similar human cultural element. Indeed, the Wise Guys are a distinctly American phenomenon. The Wise Guys began with a single pack of the same name operating in Chicago in the early 1910s. The initial name was a joke decided on by the alpha Gianluigi Lucci, a double meaning based on his prankster tendencies and the prominent Mafia organization lead by Johnny Torrio in Chicago at the time. However, their “cover” as an Italian street gang in the area quickly killed the joke when Torrio himself used their services and, after a few successful jobs, took them completely under his wing. The Wise Guys found the alliance advantageous as well; they got weaponry and money from the Mafia, and used it to fund their own activities. Torrio never knew the truth about them, but quickly learned they were devastating when he needed a more violent touch than he usually preferred. They weren’t the only pack to involve themselves in organized crime; however, they were the only pack that had Lucci, who earned his place in the history books as one of the great spiritual innovators of the modern tribe for a number of well-known reasons. Lucci turned what could have been a fairly one-track, violent pack into an eclectic group of spiritualist musclemen with many tricks up their sleeves, who had already begun to turn heads. The only thing holding Lucci back from personally revolutionizing the tribe fell away in 1921 when A1 Capone started wielding the power in Chicago’s Mafia. While Lucci had always been proudly Italian, Capone married an Irish woman, was best friends with a Jew, and made use of the best Chnpfer Two: defworkiy people he could find, regardless of nationality. For Lucci, it was a revelation. Lucci began teaching his tricks and beliefs to any Glass Walker he met, and his pack’s reputation meant people listened. He also recommended them to Capone and thus created the camp. Capone for his part liked the reputedly needlessly violent group and employed them often. They were dynamite waiting to go off, a camp with numerous Gifts, rites and beliefs to teach backed by a powerful criminal syndicate with enormous influence along the US East Coast. A year later, they had become the face of the tribe as Lucci visited his parents’ homeland and started setting up packs in Italy. (Although he avoided Sicily, where the Mafia’s strength and resistance to American families was too strong to handle, and instead set up the camp in Rome, where the Central House’s head house was often based until it fell apart.) However, as fast as the camp ascended, they imploded almost as quickly. Despite holding out against the quickly growing Corporate Wolves after World War 11, by 1975 the Corporate Wolves were simply too strong to resist. By 1980 the combined effects of the RICO (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations) Act and the Italian government’s relentless crackdown on the Mafia had weakened the camp to the point of uselessness. Lucci got to see his brainchild die, and with Lucci’s death in 1998, the camp was little more than a shadow upon the tribe.
